Open Lighting Project

The Open Lighting Project is a multi-faceted effort aimed at accelerating the adoption of new, standardized control protocols, while also providing high quality, reliable, open software for the lighting industry. This site acts as a resource for anyone looking for information about DMX software and the associated control systems, as well as a variety of Open Source and free lighting software.

The Open Lighting Architecture provides a framework for distributing lighting control information. It supports many protocols such as E1.31 (sACN), ArtNet, ShowNet, Pathport, RDM and over a dozen USB devices. It can run as a standalone service, which is useful for converting signals between protocols, or alternatively it can be used as the backend for Controller Applications. OLA runs on many different platforms including ARM, which makes it a perfect fit for low cost Ethernet to DMX gateways.

Testing RDM Responder used to involve manually sending commands and verifying the responses. Not any longer! The RDM Responder Tests automate all of this and provide a detailed breakdown of how well a responder complies with the E1.20 (RDM) standard. This saves time during the product development process and raises the quality of RDM implementations across the industry.

The Raspberry Pi is one of the most popular platforms for running OLA. With the addition of a USB to DMX device, one can build a low cost, but fully functional Ethernet gateway. The OLA on Raspberry Pi tutorial has a step by step guide to installing OLA on the Pi.

rdm.openlighting.org

The http://rdm.openlighting.org site contains an index of RDM-enabled products as well as the specifications for many of the manufacturer specific PIDs. The site has recently been expanded to display the results of the RDM Responder Tests. The data on the site is available free of charge through APIs.

Contact / Support

Since this is an Open Source project, there is no commercial support for our products at this time. There are a number of ways of reaching the community though:

There is also an Open Lighting Community on Google+. This is less OLA centric and more about sharing cool lighting projects people are working on. We also have a cafepress store where you can buy OLA t-shirts, stickers, and a few other random things. Visit Open Lighting at Cafepress! Prices may change in the future.

Other Projects

libartnet. The library that started it all, libartnet is an ArtNet implementation for Mac, Linux, Windows & iPhone.